Venue Space B – Focus on Awe

Prayer Strategies

Strategy #1

This team is the most important of all of the intercessory strategies we will roll out.  You were hand picked to be on it, and it is a small team.

A number of years ago, we felt a lot of slippage on who we were as a company and how we should filter the opportunities.  We stood down from the activities and accrued a pile of clues then crafted a bucket full of statements.

At the end of the day, we anchored my journey on this statement.

“I am made to impact the spiritual and natural realms through the awe of God.”

Megan crafted that into the picture above, which hangs over my desk as a daily, hourly reminder that I have a specific calling in life and it is to sanctify a process, not to produce a product.

Everyone coming to the event has an agenda.  They want something, probably legitimately, and it is most likely not a big dose of awe!

My job is to saturate the event with the awe of God, whether that is what people want or not.  If I can stay in the place of personal awe of God, and not be pulled into the human element, God will make my message highly transformational.

The Space B section of the seating is front and center.  Right under my nose.  Smack dab in front of me.  We are controlling the seating tightly to prevent parasites and mockers from sitting in that space.

Whether you are on site, in Space B, or on site in another section, or offsite, your job is to fill your spirit and soul with awe from your own journey before the day.  You want to be able to saturate the atmosphere in that section with the awe of God from your EARNED AUTHORITY so that it will flow to me and I can stay vertical and not get pulled horizontally into meeting people’s needs.

So step one is to START YOUR LIST.  Whether you are onsite or offsite, you need a written list of awe moments in your life, so you can draw on those for the three second flare prayers when you get an ELBOW as well as for the long term preparation prayers.

We will be working on that list relentlessly in the coming weeks, going through your life and the lives of those you know, pulling illustrations of awe.  For this assignment, go through your life from conception to the present, jotting down bullet points of awe moments.  We will widen the net week by week, but today, do a good search of your own life.

When you have finished your first pass, start blessing Space B AND THE PLATFORM WHERE I WILL STAND with the awe of God as experienced in your journey.  Embed it in the land, the building, the furniture and the atmosphere.  Ask God to build spiritual structures that support awe.

As a sidebar, war against all the superficiality and other things from previous events there.

Then, since God knows exactly who is going to be seated there, bless those 24 people with a massively enlarged sense of awe before they come.  Ask God to open their eyes to the awe experiences they have had already, to bring new ones, and to enlarge their capacity for awe.

I will be inviting people who are already big spirited to sit there, people who know their God.  We cannot have too much awe in that section so work hard on the land, building and atmosphere.

I think your effectiveness in blessing the platform where I will stand, and the land and the furniture and the people in Space B, will have a monumental impact on the transformational power of the event.

Hammer down!

Strategy #2

In your first assignment, I asked you to start a written list of awe moments that impact you.

Now we want to begin to build out certain categories of awe.  Of course, use your life, but in addition to that, explore the list of Biblical people that is attached.  I use this consistently in my studies.  I have a half a dozen copies printed at any time, sitting by my various study areas, so I can grab one and mark it up briskly when I am following a particular trail of thought.

In this season of prayer and preparation, we want to focus on God’s creativity.  Consider these three pictures.

     - Jesus and Saul of Tarsus.  Jesus basically just clubbed him over the head.  Primitive but effective.

     - Jesus and Mary of Magdala.  Jesus spoke with infinite tenderness and hacked her grief with two syllables.

     - Daniel in the lions’ den.  God used wicked men, to set a trap for themselves, to rid the government of the entire toxic “deep state” in a single day, and to give Daniel a chance to restaff the bureaucracy with good people.

It was sheer genius to use the bad guys to kill the bad guys.  Only God.

Most of the Sunday school stories about awe were power stories.  All good.

But there is more to awe than destroying Egypt, nuclear fire on Mt. Carmel and raising Jesus from the dead.

Find one or two stories of the creativity of God that moves you to awe, and add them to your list, and when your emotions are stirred, bless your section of land, seats and atmosphere with more of the awe of God.  Invite Him to do amazingly creating things in my mind and mouth, and in the spirit, soul and body of each listener.

Click here to download "Bible Women and Men" list as a PDF file.

Strategy #3

For this season of prayer, please explore creation and ponder the amazing things God does.

For me, mosquitoes in Alaska are absolutely baffling.  They have no fur, do not hibernate in warm caves, and do not migrate to Florida every winter.

How do trillions of them survive every winter in Alaska?

The concept of the moon’s “gravitational pull” causing massive ocean tides every day, all around the world, is staggering.  How can the moon cause a pull on water?

The way an owl can twist his neck around, almost 270 degrees is almost incomprehensible when compared to my neck.

If you are not a Creation Person with a ready file, then do a web search for “amazing things in nature.”  Lots there to widen your sense of awe.

Each time you do one of those exercises that brings your spirit and soul to a larger place of awe, bless time and space in your section of the venue with the capacity to celebrate God’s unusual methods in an even larger way.

Copyright by Arthur Burk